The Weekly Standard reserves the right to use your email for internal use only. Occasionally,
we may send you special offers or communications from carefully selected advertisers we believe may be of benefit to our subscribers.
Click the box to be included in these third party offers. We respect your privacy and will never rent or sell your email.

Please include me in third party offers.

The headline on Richard Pollock's Washington Examiner piece is troubling, which is a high bar to clear, these days.

Feds reviewed only one bid for Obamacare website design

The details are depressingly predictable:

There is no evidence CMS issued any public solicitation for the Obamacare website contract. TheExaminer asked both CMS and CGI for copies of any public solicitation notice for the Healthcare.gov task orders. Neither CMS nor CGI furnished any such public notice.

The vice president for global communication of CGI – the Canadian company that built this turkey – did her best to help clear up any confusion about this matter, saying:

“There were at least two bidders, we believe three, for the task order. That is all the information I have."

Two … three … whatever. Close enough for government work.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, the government agency that let the contract, was even less forthcoming, responding to requests for more information by saying, essentially, "none of your business."

CMS spokesman Tasha Bradley declined to provide a public solicitation document, saying the only way to obtain such a document would be to submit a Freedom of Information Act request.

You can bet that once they have all the "glitches" worked out, the people who built, paid for, and are operating this system will know everything they want to know about you.